Live data from Hacker News

OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

h-online.com

31–40 of 64 posts

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#31
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that 'Solaris' is a trademarked term, owned by Sun (now Oracle). If you fork it, you can't call it 'Solaris' anymore. You'd have a hard time selling/promoting this new unix os that no-one has heard of.

You're right, it would have to be a different name. However, if there were a sufficient community around it, this would not be a problem. But because it's so driven by Sun, and they never really managed to build an active community, there is no one who would naturally start using the forked OS.

May I be the first to suggest calling it either "Rheya" or "Kelvin"?

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#32
post #22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Nexenta, which uses the Solaris kernel, but with a Debian server-style userland, as a NAS. If ZFS were on Linux, I too would switch to it. Straight Solaris is like travelling back in time in comparison to the usual GNU userland, and while it's got nicely integrated ideas - like the services, logging and monitoring, etc., - the cost of being in a less mainstream branch is reasonably high. At least with Nexenta,…

Wait a year or two - RHEL 6 has btrfs (copy on write with btrees) in tech preview now.

Don't even wait, Next3 is stable. Out of efficient snapshots, other ZFS goodies are easily covered with lvm, etc.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#33
post #11

I've been following this for a while. OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and MySQL are all things I was worried about surviving in the wake of Oracle's takeover. I use all three quite a bit.

I don't think you have anything to worry about virtualbox, virtualization and cloud computing are now instrumental to growth. Oracle did not have a comprehensive strategy. With VirtualBox it gives them a jump start on building a roadmap to one. The other two, yeah they are in trouble. I was worried about Netbeans and Glassfish before the acquisition because it is the most rapid way to develop in Java and the best solution out there in the latest class of IDE / server run-time combos. They just released new versions so I am starting to feel some relief on that one. I got bit on OpenSolaris and OpenSSO I used both of them extensively and they killed both pretty quickly.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#34
post #22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Nexenta, which uses the Solaris kernel, but with a Debian server-style userland, as a NAS. If ZFS were on Linux, I too would switch to it. Straight Solaris is like travelling back in time in comparison to the usual GNU userland, and while it's got nicely integrated ideas - like the services, logging and monitoring, etc., - the cost of being in a less mainstream branch is reasonably high. At least with Nexenta,…

Wait a year or two - RHEL 6 has btrfs (copy on write with btrees) in tech preview now.

Why wait? FreeBSD has support for ZFS now as well as a great package system.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#35
post #25

Here's a view from a prominent member of the (rather small) OpenSolaris community: http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134 He's not exactly impressed.

Remember the OGC is headed by Schilly. Who's quite famous for actively campaigning to stop people patching his OSS cdrecord to use regular device files, and has a reputation of being very outspoken against anyone who disagrees with him.

If the OGC head is a problem, this, certainly, solves it.

Oracle can easily make a new OGC the following day and name whoever they are comfortable with (or whoever they think will help OpenSolaris get developed in the right direction.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#36
post #16

I'd love to have a lively discussion here about OpenSolaris, could not upvote this enough (actually I don't think my upvote counts at all, is that because I don't have karma yet?)

Yes, otherwise people would be able to create dummy accounts and vote themselves up for nothing.

Some things I have been observing can be explained by that. I believe this gotcha is being actively circumvented.

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#38

Here's a view from a prominent member of the (rather small) OpenSolaris community: http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134 He's not exactly impressed.

This article got submitted too:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512766

Re: OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

#39
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that 'Solaris' is a trademarked term, owned by Sun (now Oracle). If you fork it, you can't call it 'Solaris' anymore. You'd have a hard time selling/promoting this new unix os that no-one has heard of.

You're right, it would have to be a different name. However, if there were a sufficient community around it, this would not be a problem. But because it's so driven by Sun, and they never really managed to build an active community, there is no one who would naturally start using the forked OS.

The community around it is not sufficient. The license prevents borrowing code from Linux. It can, however, borrow BSD code.

But not even that would be enough to keep it alive and evolving.

Post reply on HN